History is always written from the sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadology, the opposite of a history.

Every stratum is a judgment of God; not only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express them selves, but so do rocks and even riv- ers, every stratified thing on earth. The first articulation concerns content, the second expression. The distinction between the two articulations is not between forms and substances but between content and expression, expression having just as much substance as content and content just as much form as expression. The double articulation sometimes coincides with the molecular and the molar, a nd sometimes not; this is because con- tent and expression are sometimes divided along those lines and some- times along different lines. There is never correspondence or conformity

Have we not, however, reverted to a simple dualism by contrasting maps to tracings, as good and bad sides? Is it not of the essence of the map to be traceable? Is it not of the essence of the rhizome to intersect roots and sometimes merge with them? Does not a map contain phenomena of redundancy that are already like traci ngs of its own? Does not a multipli- city have strata upon which unifications and totalizations, massifications, mimetic mechanisms, signifying power takeovers, and subjective attribu- tions take root? Do not even lines of flight, due to their eventual diver- gence, reproduce the very formations their function it was to dismantle or outflank? But the opposite is also true. It is a question of method: the trac- ing should always be put back on the map.

We are no more familiar with scientif-icity than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages.

No signifiance, no subjectification: writing to the «th power (all individuated e nunciation remains trapped within the dominant significations, all signifying de sire is associated with dominated subjects). An assemblage, in its mult iplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic flows, I NTRODUCTION: RHIZOME □ 23 material flows, and social flows si multaneously (independently of any recapitulation that may be made of it in a scientific or theoretical corpus). There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book ) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage estab lishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders

Even though there is a real dis tinction between them, content and expression are relative te rms ("first" and "second" articulation should also be understood in an entirely relative fashion). Even though it is capable of invariance, expression is just as much a variable as content. Content and expression are two variables of a functi on of stratification. They not only